Czech Republic Company Register: How to Search the Obchodní rejstřík and Verify Czech Companies (2026)

1. What is the Czech company register?

The Czech register is a family of registers rather than one. The law calls it the Veřejný rejstřík (Public Register) and splits it into six: the registers of associations, foundations, institutes, homeowners' associations, and public-benefit companies, and the one most people mean, the Obchodní rejstřík (Commercial Register). Act No. 304/2013 Coll. on public registers says all six are kept electronically by the courts, and all six are searched in the same application on or.justice.cz, run by the Ministry of Justice.

Seven registry courts keep the files: the Municipal Court in Prague and the regional courts in České Budějovice, Plzeň, Ústí nad Labem, Hradec Králové, Brno, and Ostrava, with branches in Liberec, Pardubice, and Olomouc. Each court opens a separate file for every registered entity. The register also has a second part, the Sbírka listin (Collection of Documents), which holds the paperwork behind the entries. The register has been kept electronically since 1 January 1997. For anything entered or filed before that date, the court issues paper copies only, unless the record has since been digitised.

On top of the courts sits ARES, the Administrativní registr ekonomických subjektů, run by the Ministry of Finance. It is not a register in its own right. It pulls together the Public Register, the trade register of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the statistical register of the Czech Statistical Office, and several other sources. Separately, the registry court passes every published entry to the tax administrator, the statistical office, and the trade licensing office within five working days.

In short: the Public Register tells you a company exists and who may sign for it, the Sbírka listin shows you what it filed, and ARES gives you the same identity data through an API.

2. How to search the Obchodní rejstřík step by step

Searching is free and needs no account. The application runs in Czech only: there is no English version of the search pages or the extract, so it helps to know a handful of field labels before you start. The FAQ at the end of this guide translates them.

1. Open the public register search

   Go to Veřejný rejstřík a Sbírka listin. The page has a single field, "Název subjektu, identifikační číslo nebo spisová značka", that takes a company name, an IČO, or a file number, next to a Hledat (search) button. The footer links to the related registers of the Ministry of Justice: the insolvency register, the trust fund register, and the beneficial owners register.

   

2. Search by IČO when you have one

   The identification number field takes up to eight digits and adds missing leading zeros itself, so you can type the number with or without them. An IČO returns exactly one entity, with no court to choose first.

3. Use the advanced search for names and people

   The "rozšířené vyhledávání" link opens filters for municipality, street, legal form, and registry court. A name needs at least three characters. Switch "Jen platné" (current only) to "Platné i neplatné" to include deleted entities and former names, and raise the result limit from 50 to 200 or 500. Separate searches list the companies in which a given natural person or legal person holds a position, so you can start from a director rather than a company.

4. Open the extract

   Each hit offers two extracts. "Výpis platných" shows the current entries; "Úplný výpis" shows the full history as well, including former names, addresses, and officers. The current extract opens with the date of entry, file number, business name, registered office, IČO, legal form, and business activities. For Škoda Auto it continues with the board, the manner of acting, the procurators, the supervisory board, the sole shareholder, the shares, and the share capital.

   

5. Open the Sbírka listin

   The third link on each hit opens the company's Collection of Documents: every filing with its type, the date of the document, the dates it reached the court and was filed, and its page count. Open a filing to download it as a PDF. Škoda Auto's own 2025 annual report, filed with its financial statements, auditor's report, and related-party report, is a single 249-page PDF. Its file also holds the Czech translation of the Volkswagen Group's 2025 annual report, a 673-page PDF marked as consolidated, so check whose report you are reading.

6. Download the signed PDF extract if you need proof

   The PDF icon at the end of the extract produces an electronic extract signed with the registry court's qualified system certificate, which the Ministry describes as fully comparable to a paper extract. Printing it reduces it to an informative copy. For a certified paper extract, take the IČO to any Czech POINT counter.

3. What data is public and what it costs

The Czech register charges for paper and almost nothing else. Everything on screen is free, including the filed accounts. You pay only when you need a certified paper extract.

Two things stand out. First, filed annual accounts are free. Every company in the register must publish its financial statements by filing them in the Sbírka listin, at the latest 12 months after the balance sheet date, and anyone can download them. Second, there are two free machine-readable routes: the open data files of the Ministry of Justice, published per legal form, court, and year in CSV and XML, and the ARES REST API of the Ministry of Finance.

What you will not find in the extract at all: revenue, employee numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, or industry codes. Business activities are listed in words, such as obráběčství (machining) on Škoda Auto's record. The accounts exist, but as PDF documents, and small and micro companies that are not subject to audit may leave out the profit and loss account entirely.

4. Czech legal forms, briefly

Czech business corporations are governed by Act No. 90/2012 Coll. on business corporations, part of the recodification of civil law that took effect on 1 January 2014. It recognises personal companies (v.o.s. and k.s.), capital companies (s.r.o. and a.s.), cooperatives, and the European forms. Every one of them is entered in the Obchodní rejstřík, and the abbreviation in the business name tells you which one you are dealing with.

The other public registers share the same search and the same IČO, so associations (spolek), foundation funds (nadační fond), institutes (ústav), and homeowners' associations all appear in the legal form filter alongside the companies, as do state enterprises (státní podnik), which sit in the Obchodní rejstřík itself. And if a self-employed counterparty does not show up at all, remember that a sole trader below the CZK 120 million threshold is entered only on request. ARES, which also covers the trade register, is the place to check next.

5. How to verify a Czech company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the IČO, the file, and the registered office

   Search the IČO on or.justice.cz and check that the business name, legal form, registered office, and file number match what you were given. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Read the full extract, not only the current one

   The Úplný výpis shows every former name, address, officer, and shareholder with the dates the changes were entered. A run of changes to the board or the registered office shortly before your deal is worth asking about.

3. Check who may sign

   Find the statutory body and read the "Způsob jednání" (manner of acting) line under it, which says whether one member may act alone or two must act jointly (for Škoda Auto, two board members act jointly), and check the procurators listed separately. Czech law protects you here: a company cannot argue against someone who relied on its entry in the register that the entry was wrong.

4. Check the ownership you can actually see

   For an s.r.o., the extract names every shareholder with the size of their stake. For an a.s., it names a shareholder only when there is exactly one: Škoda Auto's extract lists a single shareholder, VOLKSWAGEN FINANCE LUXEMBURG. The beneficial owners register no longer helps a member of the public, because the Ministry of Justice closed it on 17 December 2025.

5. Pull the latest accounts from the Sbírka listin

   Open the Collection of Documents and download the most recent účetní závěrka (financial statements) and výroční zpráva (annual report). Check the year as well as the figures: the deadline is 12 months after the balance sheet date. A company that has not filed accounts for two consecutive accounting periods is called on by the court to file within a month and can be fined up to CZK 100,000, and if the court cannot deliver that call, it starts proceedings to dissolve the company.

6. Search the insolvency register

   Search the IČO in the Insolvenční rejstřík (insolvency register), which is free and covers proceedings opened after 1 January 2008. Insolvency decisions also land in the Sbírka listin, but the insolvency register shows the proceedings themselves.

7. Validate the VAT number

   Put CZ in front of the IČO and check it in the EU's VIES system. CZ00177041 comes back valid for Škoda Auto a.s. VIES reports VAT registration only, so a company that is not registered for VAT does not validate there, however valid its IČO.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: for a handful of lookups, the Czech register gives you the record, the history, and the filed accounts, and costs nothing. The limits show up when you need English, structured financials, ownership, or scale:

• Czech only. The search pages and the extract have no English version. Field labels, legal forms, and business activities all come back in Czech.
• Accounts are documents, not data. Financial statements sit in the Sbírka listin as PDFs, sometimes hundreds of pages long. Škoda Auto's 2025 annual report is a 249-page file. Free to download, slow to turn into numbers.
• Small companies may skip the P&L. Small and micro companies that are not audited may publish their accounts without a profit and loss account, so revenue may simply not be there.
• Ownership gaps. A joint-stock company's shareholders are not named unless there is only one, and the beneficial owners register has been closed to the public since 17 December 2025.
• No firmographics. The extract has no field for revenue, employees, phone, email, or industry code. Business activities are free text.
• Built for single lookups. A result list stops at 500 entries, the Ministry may restrict anyone sending more than 3,000 requests a day or 50 a minute, and the site may ask for a CAPTCHA at random.
• ARES is for information only. The Ministry of Finance says so itself, and it may restrict users who send more than 500 requests a minute. For legal certainty you still need the court's extract.
• Open data with conditions. The open data terms of March 2019 allow copying, distribution, and citation and name non-commercial use explicitly, and the files contain personal data, which makes whoever downloads them a data controller under the GDPR.

If you check one Czech supplier a quarter, none of this matters. If you onboard hundreds, it is the whole problem.

7. Access Czech register data programmatically

The official ARES REST API is free and needs no key, and for identity checks it is genuinely good. Where it stops is the shape of the data: one endpoint returns a basic record (name, address, legal form, CZ-NACE codes), but the full public register entry with officers and shareholders, the statistical register, and the trade register each sit behind their own endpoint, and there is no endpoint for the filed accounts at all.

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 3,514,138 Czech entities, sourced directly from the public register, the Sbírka listin, and ARES, and refreshed as new entries and filings appear. IČO numbers are already zero-padded and validated, filed financial statements are read out of the PDFs into structured fields, and records are enriched with revenue, employees, and contact data that the official register does not publish.

Our ARES API lets you look up any Czech entity by IČO, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start. It is part of our global Company Data API, used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Czech checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=CZ&registration_id=00177041

{
  "name": "Škoda Auto a.s.",
  "legal_form": "Akciová společnost",
  "registration_id": "001 77 041",
  "city": "Mladá Boleslav",
  "start_date": "1990-11-20"
}

Every field above is what the free extract on or.justice.cz shows for Škoda Auto. Revenue, employees, and contact details come back on the same record where we hold them, and are absent here for the reason this guide keeps running into: the Czech register does not publish them as data.

8. Czech Republic vs other company registers

The Czech Republic gives away more than most registers in this table: search, extracts, filed accounts, and an official API all cost nothing. Where it falls behind is language and format. For context: